Far Above Cayuga’s Waters, Pusillanimous President Pollack is Packing Up 

Cornell, where Vladimir Nabokov once taught European Literature, and Benzion Netanyahu taught Jewish history, and Morris Bishop taught Romance Literature, and Hans Bethe taught theoretical physics, has for the past few years endured as its president Martha Pollack. Now she will leaving that post, having come a cropper, like Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, over how she handled antisemitism at her institution. “Critics Denounce Outgoing Cornell University President Over Praise for Pro-Hamas Demonstrators,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, May 17, 2024:

Outgoing Cornell University president Martha Pollack, who will leave office at the end of June, was criticized this week for issuing a statement which praised pro-Hamas protesters and painted their detractors as bigots.

Pollack’s remarks followed a student group’s ending a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” it had erected on campus and lived in for three weeks. In them she expressed “gratitude” for the students’ conduct and said they “minimized the disruption caused” to university business despite that Jewish students complained that their rhetoric was discriminatory, inciting, and disruptive.

My, how indulgent President Pollack was to those raucous mobs of students whom she praised for having “minimized the disruption” they caused to university business. But why should any disruption have been tolerated? And if the university business was, as she claims most doubtfully, hardly affected, what about the “disruption” to the lives of the Jewish students on campus? They had to endure the endless shouting of slogans such as “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” — which means, rightly understood, a call for the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement by a 23rd Arab one — and “Say No To Genocide,” which is a blood libel directed at Jews and the Jewish state. Surely their lives were disrupted. Imagine how Jewish students must have felt, walking across the campus, hearing these rants. The display of such naked hate must have made them anxious. But Martha Pollack thinks the pro-Hamas protesters are not to be deplored, but praised.

Pollack then launched a volley of seemingly underhanded comments at Jews and pro-Israel activists who opposed the demonstration, saying, “The participants in the encampment shared that members of our Jewish community who have criticized Israel have been targeted with the slur ‘kapo,’ which not only is deeply offensive but also trivializes the memory of the Holocaust.”

She continued, “Other students involved in the encampment shared experiences of being called ‘terrorists’ over the past few months in an expression of anti-Arab discrimination and hatred. No matter one’s political beliefs, using such rhetoric, which questions the basis of someone’s religious, cultural, ancestral, or any form of identity is unacceptable, and I implore everyone in our community to think carefully about their words.”…

But what were the protesters doing if not stating their solidarity with the terror group Hamas? And those who objected to them were not wrong to call them “terrorists” — for these protesters were indeed trying to strike terror in the hearts of the Jewish students and other supporters on campus of the Jewish state. There is nothing “anti-Arab” about denouncing these people as “terrorists.” Some of the protesters were Arabs, many others were not. Nothing that was said about them implicated a particular ethnic background. It is Martha Pollack who is making the connection between “terrorism” and “being Arab.”

Has Martha Pollack denounced antisemitism on campus? Has she done anything to discipline the students who have been involved in the harassment of Jewish students, the hate speech directed at them? There is no evidence of any such action.

Claudine Gay was forced to resign not just because of her extensive record of plagiarism, but because, like Elizabeth Magill, she was unable to provide a simple “yes” in answer to the question posed by Representative Elise Stefanik, as to whether a call for the genocide of Jews would violate her campus’ code of conduct, insisting that it would “depend on the context.”

Martha Pollack chose to praise the protesters for keeping “disruption,” as she said, to a minimum. How slow she was, and how feeble, in her response to the displays of “rampant antisemitism” on campus over the past seven months. Instead, she chose to denounce those who described those who praised terrorist murderers as “terrorists” themselves, even ascribing to them anti-Arab sentiments without the slightest evidence.

Cornell University law professor William Jacobson, writing on his blog Legal Insurrection, said Pollack’s remarks about the protesters amounted to “an inversion of reality” which misrepresented the situation there.

“The anti-Israel perpetrators were portrayed as the victims, and the campus victims who had to put up with seven months of abuse were portrayed as the problem,” Jacobson wrote. “The statement really upset a lot of people.”…

Far above Cayuga’s waters, Martha Pollack is packing up. May her replacement be someone who knows the difference between those spittle-flecked protesters calling for the Jewish state’s destruction and vilifying Jews, and those others on campus, like Professor Jacobson, joined by the ghosts of Nabokov, Netanyahu, Bishop, and Bethe — who call them out.